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New Horizons captured its first (distant) images of Pluto in late September 2006, during a test of the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. [24] The images, taken from a distance of approximately 4.2 billion kilometers, confirmed the spacecraft's ability to track distant targets, critical for maneuvering toward Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects.
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris.
The geography of Pluto refers to the study and mapping of physical features across the dwarf planet Pluto. On 14 July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft became the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] During its brief flyby, New Horizons made detailed geographical measurements and observations of Pluto and its moons .
NASA launched the New Horizon spacecraft in 2006 to learn more about the icy dwarf planet Pluto. Here are some of the first photos from that mission, taken from between 125 and 115 million miles away.
In January 2006, the New Horizons spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 41 on a mission to visit Pluto. To accelerate toward its target, the spacecraft used an Earth-and-solar escape trajectory , achieving a speed of approximately 16.26 km/s (10.10 mi/s; 58,500 km/h; 36,400 mph), and later performed a gravity assist ...
The following is a list of Solar System objects by orbit, ordered by increasing distance from the Sun. Most named objects in this list have a diameter of 500 km or more. The Sun, a spectral class G2V main-sequence star; The inner Solar System and the terrestrial planets. 2021 PH27; Mercury. Mercury-crossing minor planets; Venus. Venus-crossing ...
Voyager Terra is a region on the dwarf planet Pluto, north of Viking Terra and Tombaugh Regio and west of Pioneer Terra, which was discovered in July 2015 by the New Horizons spacecraft. It is named for the Voyager program and Voyager 2 , the first spacecraft to explore Uranus and Neptune and to cross into interstellar space .
Observations by the James Webb Space Telescope are giving scientists a fuller understanding about the composition and evolution of Pluto's moon Charon, the largest moon orbiting any of our solar ...